It’s easy to get distracted by arguments about whether faculty are paid too much or too little. The better question is: why does everyone get paid on more or less the same scale when the massive differences in productivity between staff are so obvious?
Some interesting evidence about this came recently from Texas. Last year, Governor Rick Perry (yes, him… the one who makes Herman Cain look Presidential) asked the state’s public universities to make data available on each professor it employed – how many courses he/she taught, how many papers they’d published, how much they earned, and how much money they’d brought in to the institution.
In the immediate term, this set off a bun fight about whether every professor needs to show that he or she “breaks even.” This is a dumb argument: the main purpose of teaching lots of different subjects in a single institution is precisely to cross-subsidize them. The problem from a political-managerial point of view is that in most universities, no one really knows what is being cross-subsidized, by whom and by how much. And the reason for that is that no one ever actually goes out and collects and publishes the kind of data that Rick Perry asked for.
Which is too bad, because the data’s really interesting. Take a look at the report that Richard Vedder and Jonathan Robe of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity put together using the data from UT Austin, the system’s flagship campus. I strongly urge everyone to read the whole thing, but the highlights are:
– 20% of professors teach 57% of the total credit hours; the least productive 20% teach only 2% of credit hours.
– The most active researchers teach about the average number of credit hours; increasing the teaching load of the bottom 80% of research performers would only trivially affect research output.
– If the bottom 80% of faculty could teach just half as much as the top 20%, the savings could fund a tuition cut of almost $4,700 (52%).
Told you it was interesting.
I’d put decent money on patterns of activity in Canadian universities being similar to those shown in the Texas data. I’m also quite sure that even in the absence of any external sanctions, just publishing this data at a Canadian institution would significantly improve internal decisions on resource allocation.
So, to all the senior administrators among our readership: how about it? Publish this data at your institution and see what happens. People who care about keeping costs down in higher education will be cheering you all the way.
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Certainly, why get distracted by the real costs driving higher tuition (administration) when it’s so much easier to blame faculty’s lack of productivity? http://chronicle.com.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/article/Graphic-How-Presidents-Pay/129981/
Drawing comparisons between the US and Canadian faculty is problematic for a few reasons- the US faculty typically have 9 month contracts and are able to use grant funding to buy out their teaching time. In Canada, faculty are on 12 month contracts and at least in the social sciences, can no longer use SSHRC funds to buy out their teaching time. To get a research grant in Canada just means more work, no release to allow for that work, unless you are adept at negotiating that release with your chair or dean, (which also tends to correlate with gender, but let’s not go there.) As a faculty member at a “research” university, I teach 20 credits a year, that’s just four (or three, depending on the institution) shy of the load at a community college! Oh yeah, and I’m supposed to supervise master’s, doctoral students, do administrative work, committee work, plus publish in order to be “productive”.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for asking for more data and transparency, I just don’t appreciate the implication that the faculty “productivity” numbers will tell you much without understanding the administrative context as well.
Who’s paying HESA and how “productive” are you? Are you going to be the model of this transparency that you call for?
I’m not sure where you’re getting the idea that I’ve made comparisons between US and Canadian faculty productivity; I haven’t. I’ve merely suggested that one US state has provided a model that Canadian institutions could use to get better information about their own productivity levels. So I’m not entirely sure where issues about administrative context come into play; within any given institution, presumably those issues are constant and so wouldn’t matter. if you were comparing (say) SFU and UT Austin, you would certainly need to do that, but that’s not at all what the point of the article was.
I don’t think there’s any real secret about our client list; however I’m puzzled why anyone who won’t sign their name to a comment in an internet forum would think they’re in a position to lecture people about transparency.
Please consider the following:
Page 4 of the report you cite, note 2
“In the 821 page document in which The University of Texas at Austin released the data, the following disclaimer is provided: ―The data in its current draft form is incomplete and has not yet been fully verified or cross referenced. In its present raw form it cannot yield accurate analysis, interpretations or conclusions.”
This is a political document, not a fact-based document.
Vedder actually has a big problem with numerators and denominators and his report has been discredited. Much of Vedder’s work, while perhaps entertaining because it is controversial, leaves a lot to be be desired in terms of useful analysis. What I find somewhat difficult to understand is why there is such a jaundiced view of faculty productivity in the first place. I’m all for better information and there is clearly a need for universities to do a better job of telling the story about faculty workload – teaching, research, and various aspects of ‘service’..On that note, the most recent data I’ve seen from the Changing Academic Profession survey suggests that, on average, Canadian faculty report spending considerably more time ‘on the job’ than faculty in the U.S. and the U.K.
Source: Research Institute for Higher Education (RIHE), The Changing Academic Profession over 1992-2007: International, (Comparative and Quantitative Perspectives, Report of the International Conference on the Changing Academic Profession Project, 2009, RIHE International Seminar Reports, Number 13, September 2009, Hiroshima University, Hiroshima, Japan.)
Ken – thanks for the heads up on the rebuttals to Vedder and it does indeed seem as if some of his numbers are exaggerated because of the preliminary nature of the data he used. A good summary of the rebuttal and the rebuttal-to-the-rebuttal can be found here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/college-inc/post/ut-austin-a-model-of-waste-or-efficiency/2011/11/18/gIQArCnLYN_blog.html.
However, even the rebuttal still finds that among tenure and tenure-track professors, the top 20% of faculty teach 47% of the credit hours and the bottom 20% teach less 5%. That’s a pretty big gap.
I don’t think the jaundice about faculty workloads is that puzzling. Tenure makes people suspicious. It’s a fantastic tool for getting people to work hard early in their career, but the effects after that are uncertain, (precisely because there’s no data of the type UT published)- and to put it mildly, from the outside the incentive structure doesn’t look good.
I’ve seen that data from the Changing Academic Profession data as well. But of course “working more” doesn’t equal “more productive” (at least in the sense economists use the term). And I personally have some questions about the CAP in the sense that the average teaching hours reported don’t line up well with what we know to be the case in a lot of universities – that the 2+2 course standard has replaced 3+3 as the norm and the practice of “buying out” one’s courses seems to be more frequent than it used to be, etc. Maybe sessionals and post-docs were over-represented in the sample? If it is a fair sample, it’s a bit odd that more people aren;t shouting the “Canadian-profs-are-the-hardest-working” finding from the rooftops. But stranger things have happened, i Suppose.